More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers

Review

Jonathan Lethem knows his way around a book. As a professor of literature and writing at Boston College, he makes his life and living all about books. His newest offering, MORE ALIVE AND LESS LONELY, creates an inviting window to look inside his library and his mind for some essential information on a writerly existence.

Christopher Boucher collected and edited over 50 of Lethem’s essays --- some previously published, some new, all striking in their perceptive understanding of how stories and authors happen. Lethem unabashedly acknowledges that the tone of some of the earlier ones, most specifically two on Kazuo Ishiguro, embarrass him now because of his naïveté in the art of literary criticism. If there was a lesson to be learned from being once innocent of specific training, the lesson was learned. He read.

"Each of the pieces pulls us in, well over our heads sometimes, as we are amateur readers.... Lethem delights in amazing his readers with the joy and exuberance of sharp, delicious writing."

Lethem’s review of Lorrie Moore’s A GATE AT THE STAIRS acknowledges that he knows one --- one --- reader who doesn’t like Moore. Even that reader was apologetic about it, he says. He uses Moore’s own allusion about how she feels the way government and elected officials affect those of us who feel safe, immune even. The novel is told by a boutique potato farmer’s daughter (yes, a boutique potato farmer), and the potatoes are like “sleeper cells” growing clustered in darkness and then assume salon names: Klamath pearls, yellow fingerlings, Rose Finns. Lethem concludes this rich review by suggesting that it is more than potatoes that adapt themselves for the world behind assumed names. Babies and grownups do, too. The review draws in old fans and no doubt created new ones.

Another captivating piece was his toast to Kenneth Koch, one of his oldest friends, before a reading at the Bowery Poetry Club in 2002, in which he acknowledges they have never met. Koch’s poetry taught him to consider that what he loves might be allowed into life. His seduction by Koch began when he was a college freshman and he bluffed his way into a poetry workshop; in a matter of months, Koch taught him that he was not a poet. He confesses that he read the entirety of “The Boiling Water” to a wedding full of people waiting to dance, which prompted me to Google the poem and see for myself the story that was so imperative that guests had to postpone their dancing. I get it. Lethem introduces Koch and his poems as the welcome in each first line: as a hot cookie cooling on a tin sheet in a corner of the kitchen, as a handclasp. What a friendship that could have been.

In another review, Lethem welcomes us to the “wacky world” of Donald Barthelme, consummate jester of the American short story. He explains that Barthelme did not bother with “dull transitions, rote explanations, or any kind of apology for what interests…him,” and he extols the creative genius who created new kinds of stories. Barthelme revels in drifting. What a perfect description of his writing. Lethem then suggests a wonderful scenario where Barthelme seems to throw baby and bathwater from the window (all the structure and rules he had perhaps been taught), but when you rush to look, both baby and bathwater have come to a gentle and happy landing in the garden.

Lethem himself plays with the concept of form: one piece is a list of possible footnotes, one is an ode to pizza slices, one a commentary on sandwiches. Each of the pieces pulls us in, well over our heads sometimes, as we are amateur readers. He introduces us to new writers and what they have to say, and reintroduces us to our old favorites, finding something startling and previously elusive about their stories. Lethem delights in amazing his readers with the joy and exuberance of sharp, delicious writing.